New Offer, New Office

[Sawyer]

I have gotten an offer that I don't think I can refuse. I am working out the details but I think it's a go. One of the things it would entail is doing a virtual office thing, where I do part time cad work for a company in NM and they redline my work and sent it back. It would be part time cad and would free me up to do much more illustrations. I am hoping some of you have knowledge of long distance telecommuting and can help me out. I would like a file sharing system that is more reliable than just e-mailing and a redline system, it was recommended that they print out my drawings and then do a high res photo send that to me and I work from that. I will be incharge of the office so I can ask for whatever I need. I will be incharge of drafter(s) (crazy I know) so a virtual hard drive where all the files are kept would be great so we can work from each others files.

 

 

Thanks

[Ernest Burden III]

Autocad's VoloView app (cheap, at least for ADSK) has a markup function. It works rather well, the app supports paperspace and xrefs. Will you be working with Autocad, or another program?

 

An FTP site sets up as just another folder on your computer, so no need to do anything fancy. I have used my clients FTP site to get drawings, but also post my work, create folders as I wish, etc. For them it's hard-drive fast, for me its only cable-modem fast, but that's fine, CAD files are fairly small.

 

Good luck! More illustration time!

[BrianKitts]

We used to do something similar to what you are after at my last place of employment. We had an office in ohio as well as one in florida.

 

Check out VPN... its actually built in to XP, and probably previous OS versions. Microsoft actually has a fairly good guidline to setting one up in their help directory. (good help from microsoft?????) anyways.......A Virtual Private Network is pretty much like creating a mapped drive over the internet. It takes a little bit to setup and then you are limited by your internet connection as to transfer rates. But if you've got the bandwidth its an easy way to go. Specially if you are using files that have a lot of external references. With this you can mirror the drive setup from the "home office" on your "remote office" so that transfering files does not require "binding" all your xrefs and saving out a file to pass.

 

As for redlines, we would actually just "redline" in autocad.......only with bright green (choose your color based on your pen settings and what colors you commonly use....obviously it doesn't matter)..... and put the corrections on its own layer..... then its just a matter of file management and incrementing files names based on revisions.

 

I'm sure there are programs out there that will accomplish what you've asked, however I just thought I'd drop this idea since I know our office set it up without having to purchase any new hardware or software.